mhss

I'm sorry if I'm splitting hairs a bit here, but I'd argue 'good enough' process is all you need even with average teams. Keep them focused, limit their in flight work, unblock them, iterations with feedback, etc; I just feel some people spend inordinate amounts of time trying to optimize process when process hits diminishing returns pretty quickly.

What things would you look at?

Manager to IC ratio is one thing, what else?

Also, what is a good manager to IC ratio for you?

I always look at it from these core 3 attributes:

- Work (interesting, career progression, etc).

- People (Good coworkers, aligned values, top-down vs bottom-up, etc).

- Compensation/Benefits (Many things to look at but I favor base and liquid components like RSUs).

At different times I've optimized for different things. I believe is pretty common to optimize for work (learning/interesting) early in our careers and then start optimizing for compensation/benefits (I include company stability here as a benefit) as we grow older and have life responsibilities.

People is something that I did not realize had such a big effect in my career and even compensation until much later in my career. If I work for an organization with people I enjoy working, values most of the things I value and I'm good at, I maximize the odds of being successful. Changing the culture of an organization is very hard, even more so when you're a leaf in the org tree.

I Am Mother https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Mother

It's almost as if the process was not the most (not even close) important thing to ship value consistently.

Do you mean not uncommon in your circle? I don’t ser how else you can call common to own two houses, and one of them just for the summer.

> Google has tons of information on you

Do you have any good sources about this? what do we know for sure Google know and track about us? I work for Google now, but speak for myself here. In my time here (not much, less than a year still) I've seen a huge focus on privacy and not storing user data. Then again, I don't work on ads. However, even before working at Google I was surprised that given my liberal sharing of information on the internet, ad targeting did not seem particularly more informed for me than "middle aged male living in Canada" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Thanks for the nudge on the guidelines, you're right.

You are however redefining the meaning in this conversation or just not really aware that no one here wants that 'mission' to fail, we want Elon's methods to fail because they set a bad precedent for current and future leaders.

I guess you can find excuses to defend anyone, including bullies. I mean, most bullies were bullied and abused themselves, so there's that. What's the excuse for the other points raised by the OP though? + a bunch of other stuff such as firing people and announcing it on Twitter over people disagreeing on Twitter with him?

I find amusing all the mental gymnastics Musk followers are doing these days. It does seem like a personality cult.

I used to look up to him, read one of his biographies, etc; Plenty to admire from his achievements, but his most recent toxic behaviour and shitty management style has really changed that.

Now you are redefining what failure looks like. I'd bet most people that don't want 'Elon the bully' to succeed are talking about their businesses failing (e.g Twitter going down). If you're somehow claiming Musk's succeeds even if SpaceX fails as a business but another company from another founder succeeds in making a multi-planetary future, that's quite the mental gymnastics, but, whatever lets you keep the saviour image of Musk you have I suppose.

I never had heard this analogy before and understood it immediately. If it didn’t click with you that’s fine, that doesn’t mean is not useful.

Analogies always fall apart somewhere under scrutiny. This one is still useful though to compare. Vitamins are successful because there’s a lot of awareness and marketing (sometimes deceitful) about the benefits of vitamins. If you’re going to build a vitamin product be prepared to spend a lot in marketing and/or have a killer user experience with tangible results to be able to rely on word of mouth.

Thanks for the reminder. I was a subscriber for a few years and then I stopped when I hit a long time crunch with no time to read much news. I just subscribed now that I feel I have some leisure time again for this and HN in general.

> the best managers are the ones who never wanted to be a manager

There's some truth to it. In the sense that I think best managers are not seeking power or "being a leader" for the sake of it. However, there are also a lot of managers that did not want to be managers and are miserable because they'd rather be doing sw engineering and as a result they're shit at their management jobs. Many do not realize it until years into the role and some cannot let go of the 'status' of being the manager and are trapped in a job they do not like, mistakenly afraid of "stepping back" on their careers.

> One way to mask that incompetence and lack of domain level knowledge, in my experience is to come by the workers and look over their shoulders and ask questions.

Nothing wrong with asking questions. I'll take a manager that asks questions 100x over a paper pusher that is not curious about what I do and makes dumb decisions due to lack of information. The difference is more nuanced. How you ask and what you ask is what makes a difference. As a manager with a long dev career before, I know better than asking random questions at random times without context. I need to provide context about why I am asking and what I'm hoping to achieve and why sometimes educating me is good for everyone in the team. You also not need to ask "over the shoulder" when you have source control, tickets, design docs and presumably other artifacts to track progress of what's being done.

Domain knowledge is a big advantage, but if you're a good manager eventually you'll find yourself leading teams in domains you had not worked on before. Unless you're talking about the domain here being "sw engineering", it is almost inevitable you end up leading teams in an area where you're not the expert. It requires a more skilled manager to be successful at leading a team where you cannot rely on your domain expertise.

> "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here"

Well, If that’s the case, whose fault is it? you hired them and you have been keeping them. This kind of passive-aggressive layoff style feels like weak leadership and trying to weasel out from paying severance. Zuckerberg is really looking like a douche and poor leader here (yes, shocking I know).

> As they say, the reward for being good at your job is more work. Expecting me to put in top effort for "the users" without compensating me doesn't work.

You do not work for free. You are being paid. 'Top effort' needs not to translate to working overtime, more hours, etc.

I truly do not understand this attitude and I can only guess comes from repeated exposure to an unfriendly environment. We're not talking here about exposing your soul to the world, a few words to explain why you want the smaller box would actually save a bunch of time and misunderstandings. Given how society works today, it's just easier.

You can always explain in a few words why, even without stating your actual underlying reasons. The clerk doesn't need all the details. This person clearly struggled more than he had to if he would have just provided a reason the clerk could understand. I bet his lack of social skills and perceived "stubbornness" were a much higher contribution factor to the clerk being puzzled and may be even thinking he was being stupid.